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We should have gone perhaps, even if the run had been dull, for it's only thirteen miles from Newton-Stewart, paradise of fishermen, to the hidden lake; but the thirteen miles turned out to be a panorama of beauty. Sir S. was surprised by its loveliness, though he knew by heart Burns's poem, "The Banks of the Cree."
In the streets of Newton-Stewart there was not so much as a stray stick or bit of paper. It looked to me a deeply religious place, and Basil said perhaps it was trying to be worthy of St. Ninian, who first brought Christianity to Scotland. He was a native of the Solway shore, but went to Rome, where they liked him very much and made him a bishop.
'Your paper woke them up, he said gleefully. 'The dark fellow went as white as death and cursed like blazes, and the fat one whistled and looked ugly. They paid for their drinks with half-a-sovereign and wouldn't wait for change. 'Now I'll tell you what I want you to do, I said. 'Get on your bicycle and go off to Newton-Stewart to the Chief Constable.
He wrote out for me a ticket to Newton-Stewart, a name which had suddenly come back to my memory, and he conducted me from the first-class compartment where I had ensconced myself to a third-class smoker, occupied by a sailor and a stout woman with a child. He went off grumbling, and as I mopped my brow I observed to my companions in my broadest Scots that it was a sore job catching trains.
Then he felt impelled to convert his own people, so he sailed from France and landed at the island of Whithorn, which is now an excursion place from Newton-Stewart.
That sounds irreverent, but, after all, an excursion is only a kind of pilgrimage; and even if people are catching fish or eating them, they can be pleased to be at the one place in Scotland where Christianity has gone on without interruption by Vikings or others for fifteen hundred years. Then, besides, Newton-Stewart has a monument of Samuel Rutherford to live up to.
At Newton-Stewart a change came over the houses, but not the people or animals. I felt that the smallest child would know more about books than I did; and there was hardly a nondescript face to be seen. All could be classified in historic Scottish types. But the whitewashed, thatched cottages in the suburbs would have looked Irish if they had not been too preternaturally clean.
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